ABBYY Vantage Reviews

We use ABBYY Vantage for invoice automation.

Some of the most helpful features of ABBYY Vantage that I really appreciate are the accuracy and the multilingual capabilities.

ABBYY Vantage provides automation of content-centric processes.

ABBYY Vantage has AI features that learn automatically about invoice fields and related functionality.

The vendor invoice processing skill of ABBYY Vantage could be enhanced by adding more fields that are commonly used across multiple invoices.

I have been working with ABBYY Vantage for more than two and a half years.

The accuracy of ABBYY Vantage is not directly applicable to us as we use this in our product to implement it with our clients, and we are yet to see the impact.

We anticipate that ABBYY Vantage will help in reducing the time taken to process invoices.

As a product manager, I am not aware of the competitor pricing for ABBYY Vantage.

I cannot think of any significant flaws in ABBYY Vantage, and I am satisfied with its features, though I may not be using it extensively.

Overall, I would rate ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

We use Vantage for invoices and purchase orders. We have around eight members using it. It's good for the document types we use. I don't think we use many of the available skills. We use the invoices and purchase orders because that's what we need for our in-house product. We might use it in the future for remittances, 

The key fields that must be captured from a particular financial document are validated. This usually gives us 80-85 percent accuracy, which is good compared to other OCR tools. 

They're constantly adding patches that fix all those issues. They make improvements on the back end. ABBYY has made many enhancements recently. The address-conversion features are critical. It automatically converts the city and state name into the ZIP code.  That's a crucial feature we wanted that they've implemented.

Integration is very easy. There are lots of connectors. 

I would like better language support for Hebrew and Arabic. They're still working on that, and we might get an update by the end of this year. There is currently no support for those two languages because they write from the right to the left side. It would be great if they could add this as soon as possible because we have customers from the Middle East and Israel. 

We might need more machine learning or cluster things for ABBYY to learn from that and improve accuracy. There's a difference when you go into the invoices. If you have one template, we need one sample to clean it, but a purchase order may need a minimum of five samples. That's something I've noticed, but they might need to improve the machine learning. Generally, ABBYY's accuracy is better than other tools.

I've been working with ABBYY Vantage for nearly four years.

Vantage performs much faster than other OCR tools.

Vantage is scalable. We can integrate it with AI, ChatGPT, and RP tools. They have connectors. 

I rate ABBYY support nine out of 10. We reach out to them when we have issues that we cannot find solutions to on the community portal. They help us with the code and are always willing to hop on a call if needed.

Positive

Deploying Vantage is simple once we have access. To integrate it with our product, we only need to add the user IDs and passwords. We also need to write some code based on our requirements. It isn't very complicated. We previously used ABBYY FlexiCapture, but today, most of our clients use Vantage, so we use the latest cloud version of ABBYY Vantage.

ABBYY is continuously updating things, but we retain backups for 14 days in case anything happens, so it doesn't affect our end-to-end automation. Generally, it doesn't require much maintenance. 

I rate ABBYY Vantage eight out of 10. I would recommend it to others. We have some things we'd like to improve, but they will probably implement these improvements in the near future. 

ABBYY's machine learning requires a lot of training for some skills, but it's not much compared to other OCR tools. You can train a template using three or four samples, but with others, it has to go up to 10. The AI of other OCR tools is not good compared to ABBYY. However, they should add support for Arabic and Hebrew as soon as possible.

Our primary use case is for processing documents and extracting data from them - using the OCR capabilities. Documents include invoices, purchase orders, things like that. I'm an IT solution manager and we are customers of ABBYY. 

We've had two main benefits from ABBYY. Screening documents is a time-consuming activity, which has no real added value by itself so the solution saves the company a lot of time. The second benefit relates to the energy involved in employees going through documents. It's tiring work and mistakes creep in. We now have an increased level of accuracy by using the solution. 

Clearly the OCR capability of ABBYY is the top feature in our context. We can rely on the ABBYY knowledge and experience to extract data and recognize texts in different situations and especially in different languages, particularly English and Chinese. 

The main thing they need to work on is simplification of the solution, particularly use of the search tool. Configuring is quite complex and it's not very user friendly, particularly the user interface if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and create some configurations for processing documents. I know they are working on it. We used the new ideas on page projects they recently released and that has been great for enabling non-IT proficient users to start configuring and using it.

The stability of the solution is good. 

It's quite easy to scale. We currently have around 10 users, mainly IT professionals but also other users. I'm responsible for managing and maintaining the solution with a support team, and we generally carry out an annual upgrade, rather than an upgrade whenever ABBYY releases a new version. We use it every day and hope to increase usage as it would help more and more people at the company. 

The technical support was good. 

The initial setup was quite simple, perhaps slightly more complicated because it's on premise so it includes taking care of the architecture. I managed the project and we built a platform in a few months. A consultant worked with me and another solution architect during the initial period. The total setup took between two to three months. 

We haven't measured ROI but definitely as mentioned, there are many time-saving benefits.

We are on-prem so we're just paying the license fee. They have a clear pricing model. You pay extra for the training content. 

The main difficulty, as I mentioned, is to get people started on it if they're not specifically trained on ABBYY or not an IT professional. It's initially quite difficult and more so now that the learning material is not freely accessible online. Other than that, it's just a matter of following the documentation and using it. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

Most of the use cases were invoice-related for sectors such as supply chain and finance. Sometimes, they were a little bit related to HR and payroll. We also had use cases for passports and IDs and documents related to HR and onboarding. 

I've also worked on a larger scale project for importing and exporting in Dubai. It had invoices, country of origin statements, and everything else that comes through with an import check event.

It was on-premise on all the projects I've worked on. I've never worked on it with the cloud. We would connect it to an RPA tool, such as UiPath or Automation Anywhere. So, it was a part of a larger solution.

Usually, it does the reading task for a document, such as an invoice, and that is a very mundane task for an employee when they have other stuff to do. It pretty much takes that off their plate. It gives them time to focus on bigger picture things or even look at the process as a whole.

It lessens the errors that can happen. An employee can be tired and read a number wrong, but if it is a computer-generated invoice, it is going to be of the best quality. If it is computer-generated, it will come out with zero error every time, and it will do it a lot faster than a person. It will extract the information and continue doing whatever you need to.

Verification station is a really good feature. It allows part-owners to be able to take a look at what comes out of the tool after a document, such as an invoice, is run through ABBYY. It also allows them to update it if there are any mistakes. So, it kind of gives them a little more control over what goes through the system and lessens the errors.

They say that they have invoice training or document training where if you put in a certain number of documents of the same type and you fix it once, twice, or a few times, it'll automatically be able to read the same document perfectly without you having to create a layout for it to follow. That has never worked properly for any project, so I just stopped recommending it completely. We spent time trying to test and getting a bunch of invoices to test it with, and in the end, it just didn't do what it needed to. If they fix that or if they can improve on that, that would be great. It will save a lot of time for a lot of people, and it will allow people with less experience with ABBYY to be able to use it.

The way FlexiLayout Studio and Project Station read a document, such as an invoice, is a little bit different. So, if you set it up in FlexiLayout Studio and create a template, it will read it just fine, but when you import it into Project Studio, sometimes, it will not read it the same way. The way both of them read is a little bit different. So, you have to go back, and you have to change it again, and it is trial and error until you get it right.

Its price should be a little lower. It is a lot higher than the competition.

The last project I worked on was in February of this year.

It is pretty stable. If I remember correctly, it has only crashed once, and I don't think it was a system issue. It was just some weird, bizarre glitch that happened at the time. Once the projects were live and running on the client system, we've never had any issues that I can think of.

Its scalability is good, but it also depends on how you're working on a project from the beginning. I like to put everything together, and I usually do think of it in a way that if we were going to add invoices in the future, it won't be a hassle. It is pretty scalable. I can have many different invoices on the same project. I can have a project going on the client-side for years and then just add to it if needed.

Usually, we have some type of business analyst whose main role is doing something that we call an OCR study. The business analyst would be reading the invoices and just telling us what the client wants to extract from them. On their end, they also make sure that the quality of the invoices is good for ABBYY. It can't be something that is written over and damaged or put in someone's pocket for a day and then in the scanner. It won't give us perfect results.

There would also be a developer who would take a look at the OCR study fed by the analyst and then think of how to develop each template. If you don't understand how you're going to design the whole project, you might need someone. Because we're putting it into another automation tool as well, after we've sort of developed everything, depending on the scale of the project, we may have somebody dedicated to just testing the submission before sending it over to the client.

We have plans to use it, and of course, it is a good product, but we work with what the client wants. So, if a client doesn't want it, then they're not going to be using it. It is not like a solution for every case in my line of work. It depends on if the client actually has a bunch of invoices or a bunch of documents that they need to read quickly. If that's the case, then we definitely recommend it every time. We recommend it over any other OCR solution on the market. ABBYY in itself isn't a perfect tool, but ABBYY is pretty good. It is not the best on the market at the moment.

I've been in contact with several people from ABBYY and their support staff. They're very helpful.

We were using the default OCR tool that came with the UiPath software. It is integrated with Google OCR and Microsoft OCR, which are okay for smaller, simpler documents, but they're not going to give you the control that you can have with ABBYY. The engine itself isn't as good.

ABBYY is definitely more mature. It's all-around better. If I pass through an invoice PDF, the percentage of getting everything right with ABBYY is higher than it is with the others. It is definitely a lot more expensive, but I can tailor what I need to each document, and I have multi-lingual support. I can pretty much just get behind what ABBYY is trying to read and make sure it is reading everything correctly, whereas, with Google OCR or Microsoft OCR, I just worked with whatever came out, and I had no control over it.

It depends. There are two types of installations. There is the standalone installation, and there is the server installation. The standalone one is very simple. It is just a normal install. You just push the license through the command prompt, and that's pretty much it. The other one is just going to take a little while longer depending on how you're going to deploy the solution for FlexiCapture on the system. From my experience, if someone is going to install it for the first time, they might need just a bit of help, but it is not that complex.

The duration depends on the solution. It depends on what a customer wants and how many invoices you're going to be preparing in ABBYY, but usually, we say that a good rule of thumb is about one to two hours for a normal invoice. If it has a complex table, then it may take three to four hours for an invoice. So, the time taken would depend on what the client actually wants. If we have five invoices for which the customer wants to use ABBYY, they can be created in a day or two days. We'll give half a day for installation, which also depends on how many servers we're going to be using. We'll give like another half a day for testing and pushing the project. So, maybe two days for five invoices is fair.

In terms of the implementation strategy, first, I would pretty much gather all the invoices the customer needs, and usually, if they are in the same sector and in the same business, they'll be very similar. If we have 50 invoices, I would rather waste an hour or two figuring out the similar invoices and then creating just 10 templates instead of 50. After that, I'd start with identifying the means of the values that I want to extract and figure those out in all of those 50 invoices, especially the ones that are going to be in the same template. Then, I'd get to work on those templates. Once I finish those, I'd push them to the project so that I can test them there, and if everything is working fine in the project, then I'd just give the solution to the customer.

We have definitely seen an ROI. Most of the ROI is related to time because it'll take a while for a human to go through a full process. If we assume that we have a process that takes a human or an employee an hour, that would be eight hours in a day. OCR would really cut that time by a lot. I'm also talking about adding automation to it, so I'm pretty much a little biased here. We can cut that time down by a lot, and once we do that, then we just have the whole process automated. It is not being done by an employee anymore, so that employee is free to do something else. So, you're saving time, money, and brainpower.

Its price should be a little lower. It is a lot higher than the competition, and if they just break the gap a little, then more people might jump onto their product. Their price is definitely a deterrent in the few cases that I remember.

They have monthly and yearly options, and if you want, they also have per project and per page options. We partnered with them for a few projects, and they provided us with a trial license that we use on our end for using the system, employing it, and developing the solution. On the client's end, they will charge them for the license because that's ongoing. They also get support and everything else.

They do charge extra for different types of installation. They have the standalone, which is pretty straightforward and a lot cheaper than the server installation. Server installation gives you a lot more, and it gives you control over the environment. They have a web management studio for the whole thing. You can create users and give people different permissions and track the progress of everything, so that's going to be a lot more expensive. I remember that one client was complaining about having to pay extra for having the Arabic language added to the system. I think they made all the languages free after that, but I'm not 100% sure.

I would advise first looking at what you're trying to extract from the documents that you have. If they are simple enough and are being extracted properly through a cheaper or a free OCR tool, then just use that. It is not going to be worth the price. If you have lots of invoices and some of them get very complex, and you'd rather have the control over making sure everything is fine, and you have no room for error, then it would be better to invest in ABBYY.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that when creating templates with different documents, make sure that you're using different identifiers for those documents. That's because, in the beginning, you might think that it would automatically know the difference between, let's say, an Amazon invoice and a Walmart invoice, but it won't unless you tell it. So, you have to make sure that those files are unique. You also have to make sure that what you've created fits perfectly for that invoice. If you leave a little bit of leeway, it is possible that something else will be picked up that you don't want, and then it will just ruin the rest of the process. It is no fault of the OCR. You just didn't restrict it properly.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of 10. It is not perfect, but it is the best I've used.

I specialize in RPA. So, I started learning FlexiCapture to include it in the automation process. Instead of users having to manually enter information into a database or something like that, they can just load their digital documents to a certain location for ABBYY to decipher them, and then the bot and the automation could just continue along with that.

For one of the projects, it was deployed on a public cloud. For the other project, it was on-premise.

The whole idea of designing your own templates is pretty much the bread and butter of the product, but that's really the best part because you can design flexible templates.

There is also the AI part. They have their machine learning models that are pre-setup for invoices and things like that, which is also very handy. It is a really good feature.

There is always room for improvement in any product. Some of the configurations for the machine learning models for invoice reading are fairly complicated. There is so much customization that is possible with that sort of thing, so it makes sense that there are a lot of options, but some of the more important ones can be a little better streamlined or more upfront. Currently, machine learning models are a little bit difficult to configure satisfactorily.

There are a lot of solutions for different things, and they are all kind of headed in the same direction where they all do everything. I know that ABBYY wants to try and do a little more RPA. Solutions like UiPath, for example, want to eat ABBYY's lunch too. They all are trying to make an all-in-one solution for all possible automation needs. In that sense, ABBYY as a standalone product could use some more automation features. They are not there yet.

Its integrations with strictly RPA products, such as UiPath, Blue Prism, and other solutions, work when they work, but when they don't, it is a kind of a pain. Those integrations could use a little bit more support.

I have run into issues with the connectors that they developed for UiPath. I had one issue with that. It didn't want to do what we wanted. We had to change how it worked a little bit as far as the automation goes. It wasn't a huge issue, but it would have been much more convenient if had worked the way it was designed to. Otherwise, in terms of the stability of the project itself, I've never seen it crash.

Its performance is usually dependent on the hardware it is installed upon. That's not really an issue with the software itself. Its accuracy is good. It is probably one of the better optical character recognition packages that I've seen, but it still is not perfect because none of them are. It is the nature of the software, but it is pretty good. As long as the clients can provide reasonably readable documents, then it has got no problems as far as I'm concerned.

It is actually relatively simple to increase the scale of the infrastructure that you install. When I was dealing with it, the licensing structure that they had was relatively affordable as compared to other solutions. The bigger the scale, the more affordable it is. These things change all the time, so I don't know if it is still current.

The projects I've been on were proof of concept and then we just rolled them into production on the first stage. It was pretty small scale, but they had plans to go large scale. One of the projects actually from my end was still just the small-scale stuff, but other departments in the company had already procured a rather large-scale ABBYY license, and it was in production. I had nothing to do with that section, but the company as a whole had a pretty large infrastructure for ABBYY itself. They were dealing with millions of pages per month or so.

For proof of concept, there were probably about four or five test users. For the second one that I worked on, it was planned to go to production from the get-go. It started out on small scale again with probably four or five users. So far, the scale is 20.

I have used tech support, and they've been extremely helpful. There was a part of the solution I couldn't figure out myself. So, I enlisted their help, and they walked me through how to do what I needed to do. They set up a time within the next day or so, and they spent an hour with me. We figured it all out, and it was good. There is always room for improvement. Other instances haven't been as perfect as that, but that was certainly a shining example.

When we did the first project, which was just the proof of concept that I was part of, they had older software from 20 years ago. There wasn't support for it anymore or something like that. They were looking for something that could handle a larger scale. So, they switched. We suggested them ABBYY, and that's where they went.

For the clients for whom I worked with ABBYY, we would arrange for them to provide an environment. We would go into the environment and install ABBYY servers. If required, we'd also walk them through installing the clients on their machines, but generally, what we've been doing so far has been the support to an RPA project. They didn't really need to use ABBYY clients. It has all been pretty much backend stuff. We would install the infrastructure, set up the automation and its interactions with ABBYY, and then run tests in UAT. Once everything is ready to go, we do the final production deployment. After that, we have a week or two of maintenance before it gets off to a specialized maintenance team.

It takes about a week for the installation, but the development planning usually takes months or longer. At the time, I was pretty much doing it myself with support from a business analyst. The deployment of the infrastructure, the development of the automation and the ABBYY components, and then running the testing was usually just a one-man job with support from a couple of other people, such as a project manager.

Once we have developed the solution, there is a testing period where we just put it in their hands, and they throw all sorts of scenarios at it. We fix the bugs as it goes along. ABBYY does have a learning function where it can pick up on these changes when things arise, as long as the users are able and familiar with how to train it, which we show them how to do. So, maintainability is pretty good as far as I'm concerned. If there is something completely wrong and it is not reading anything right, then we have to go in and edit the templates, etc. Generally, if we set it up right and they learn how to teach it right, it is pretty stable.

The client got an ROI in reducing the number of hours that the users have to spend on a given task. Again, my solutions are not purely ABBYY, so it is hard to say how much of the benefit the ABBYY section alone was. Usually, ABBYY is involved because the users are spending a lot of time entering the information they see on a piece of paper into the system, whereas ABBYY can read it all in seconds. So, there is certainly great time savings. It then becomes a matter of comparing the cost of installation and the cost of developing the solution, licensing, and everything else with the costs and the time of those users. Even if it is pretty close to equal, they usually go for it because it is a much better environment for the users to work in and is less tedium. So, they have more employee satisfaction.

It is more on the reasonable side as compared to the competition that I am aware of. I'm not an expert on pricing schemes for all sorts of things, but when we offer them a solution, we like to say we're agnostic. So, we offer more than one solution when possible. Amongst the ones that we've offered, ABBYY usually is the more reasonable solution on a big scale. On a small scale, they're all pretty similar.

As far as I understand, you pay a license for a number of pages, and that's pretty much it. It has just the rate per page, and it decreases as you scale.

I've never done a strictly ABBYY solution. My solutions have all been ABBYY plus UiPath or something like that. After a solution has been deployed, there have always been bug fixes. Other than that, clients have always been extremely happy with this solution. They're excited they have to do less work.

If you have the right use case, it is definitely worth it. As a solution, I would rate ABBYY a nine out of 10. It is a solid solution, and support is there. It is good.

Our primary use case of this solution is for document processing. Whenever I receive an email from a vendor or business it gets processed to the ABBYY server. I've created a layout in FlexiCapture that recognizes the template, extracts the field and puts it into the Excel format. I mainly work with purchase and invoice documents and ABBYY checks the validation conditions of an invoice. I'm the manager RPA developer and we are customers of ABBYY FlexiCapture.

The advantage of the solution is being able to identify and extract the element you need from a document. The template can be customized for this. We can create our own rules to validate some values before exporting the results. 

I would like to see consistency improved. If the same document is uploaded twice, I might get a different outcome the second time. Machine learning needs to be improved. We have some issues with scanned documents that may have a quality less than 300 dpi and the quality isn't high enough for ABBYY to accurately read it, and it therefore requires manual intervention. There is scope for improvement which could include AI modelling and training. If AI is there then it will identify it in a better way. There is a field training option that already has an ML algorithm for it, but it's not much use. Hand-written documents have less than 50% accuracy. 

I've been using this solution for a year and a half. 

We haven't had any issues with stability, I think it's better than other solutions. 

I don't know about scalability because I'm the only user in the company. We deployed in the AWS server and we have a team who control everything. We currently have eight projects related to OCR which are in the pipeline. I have already trained two other guys.

There is a forum for support but not many people are active. We have a license with them so we will usually receive a response within 48 hours. 

The initial setup was okay, the difficulties came later with the poor quality of documents we received. 

We pay an annual license fee, our management team that deals with that. 

I did a POC on all the different OCR tools in terms of the level of accuracy I get from each document. ABBYY and Amazon Textract did quite well, whereas Kofax did not provide as good a result. Textract reads the entire document data and provides raw data output in the string format. With ABBYY, I can add a field into the template and then extract it but in Textract adding a customized field is not possible.

Anyone using this needs to know they won't get 100% accuracy. Human intervention is required depending on the quality of the document. Clearly, if the quality is good, the results will be better. ABBYY has been on the market for over 20 years so they're well supported including all other RPA tools. Competitively, I think ABBYY is better than other OCR tools. 

It's good to test the solution with multiple samples. Once you create a layout, test it with multiple documents and see what you're able to achieve. If I see that 30 out of 100 documents are not processed 100%, I'll retrain it to improve the accuracy level for when the same document comes in next time.

I rate this solution a six out of 10. 

I use ABBYY Vantage in my company for extracting data from invoices, IDs, and contracts. I have also used ABBYY Vantage to extract data in English from different documents.

As my company operates in the Middle East, it is important for us to have a solution that accepts Arabic characters from documents. The most valuable feature of the solution is the extraction of data from passports and national IDs, a task that is generally difficult for most of the OCR engines to check data from such documents.

ABBYY Vantage is a product that does not include the Arabic language. From an improvement perspective, ABBYY Vantage should include the Arabic language.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage since 2018. My company has a partnership with ABBYY.

It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I work in a software company where there are more than 50 users of ABBYY Vantage.

The solution's technical support is very supportive.

In the past, my company used to use IQ Bot from Automation Anywhere. My company moved from IQ Bot to ABBYY Vantage to avail the latter product's features.

The product's initial setup is neither simple nor difficult.

If one uses ABBYY Vantage and is familiar with its components, I believe one can handle its setup phase. I think it is not a very basic solution.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. Depending on the projects undertaken by my company, I have also used the product on the cloud services by AWS.

ABBYY Vantage is a bit of an expensive tool. The payment model for ABBYY Vantage is such that a user needs to make payments for the number of pages consumed with the help of the tool.

I think my company chose ABBYY Vantage over other products in the market owing to the fact that it is a reliable product that offers stability, features, and capabilities to extract data from different documents. In our company, we tested ABBYY Vantage for many of our projects and saw that it delivers results.

I recommend ABBYY Vantage to those who plan to use it in the future, especially if you deal with complex, semi-structured, or unstructured documents since it is a dependable tool that provides high accuracy. Suppose a user wants to use a product to segregate financial documents and needs a tool that provides very high accuracy, then my company recommends ABBYY Vantage.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

ABBYY Vantage is used for reading documents that require OCR or document intelligence, such as sales invoices.

The UI is user-friendly and ABBYY Vantage supports over 100 languages.

The handwritten recognition has room for improvement.

ABBYY Vantage is mainly available on the public cloud but for clients that use a private cloud, it is complicated to set up the solution.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for two years.

I give the stability of ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

I give the scalability of ABBYY Vantage a nine out of ten. The solution can handle millions of documents.

I give the initial setup an eight out of ten. There are two ways to utilize the solution. An individual can use the web-based user interface, which is easy to set up. If we intend to use the solution for bulk sorting, we'll need to use the API, which is also straightforward to set up. The full deployment can take a couple of days.

We implement the solution for our customers.

The price for ABBYY Vantage is at par with its competitors. I give the price a six out of ten.

I give ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

We have over 1,000 people using the solution.

ABBYY Vantage offers better language support compared to its competitors, and it also demonstrates good connectivity and accuracy.

ABBYY Vantage is primarily designed as an enterprise-level solution that effectively fulfills OCR requirements. However, I do not suggest this solution for small companies or individuals.